Memories, Dreams, Reflections

by C. G. Jung

  Clark University

  Worcester, Mass.

  September 14, 1909

  … Last night there was a tremendous amount of ceremony and fancy dress, with all sorts of red and black gowns and gold-tasseled square caps. In a grand and festive assemblage I was appointed Doctor of Laws honoris causa and Freud likewise. Now I may place an L.L.D. after my name. Impressive, what? … Today Prof. M. drove us by automobile out to lunch at a beautiful lake. The landscape was utterly lovely. This evening there is one more “private conference” in Hall’s house on the “psychology of sex.” Our time is dreadfully crammed. The Americans are really masters at that; they hardly leave one time to catch one’s breath. Right now I am rather worn out from all the fabulous things we have been through, and am longing for the quiet of the mountains. My head is spinning. Last night at the awarding of the doctorate I had to deliver an impromptu talk before some three hundred persons.… Freud is in seventh heaven, and I am glad with all my heart to see him so.…

  I am looking forward enormously to getting back to the sea again, where the overstimulated psyche can recover in the presence of that infinite peace and spaciousness. Here one is in an almost constant whirlwind. But I have, thank God, completely regained my capacity for enjoyment, so that I can look forward to everything with zest. Now I am going to take everything that comes along by storm, and then I shall settle down again, satiated …

  Albany, N. Y.

  September 18, 1909

  … Two more days before departure! Everything is taking place in a whirl. Yesterday I stood upon a bare rocky peak nearly 5600 feet high, in the midst of tremendous virgin forests, looking far out into the blue infinities of America and shivering to the bone in the icy wind, and today I am in the midst of the metropolitan bustle of Albany, the capital of the State of New York! The hundred thousand enormously deep impressions I am taking back with me from this wonderland cannot be described with the pen. Everything is too big, too immeasurable. Something that has gradually been dawning upon me in the past few days is the recognition that here an ideal potentiality of life has become reality. Men are as well off here as the culture permits; women badly off. We have seen things here that inspire enthusiastic admiration, and things that make one ponder social evolution deeply. As far as technological culture is concerned, we lag miles behind America. But all that is frightfully costly and already carries the germ of the end in itself. I must tell you a great, great deal. I shall never forget the experiences of this journey. Now we are tired of America. Tomorrow morning we are off to New York, and on September 21 we sail! …

  Steamer Kaiser Wilhelm der Groose

  September 22, 1909

  North German Lloyd

  BREMEN

  … Yesterday morning I shook the dust of America from my feet, with a light heart and an aching head, for the Y.’s plied us with wonderful champagne.… As far as abstinence goes, I’ve arrived on very shaky ground indeed, in point of principle, so that I am honorably withdrawing from my various teetotal societies. I confess myself an honest sinner and only hope that I can endure the sight of a glass of wine without emotion—an undrunk glass, of course. That is always so; only the forbidden attracts. I think I must not forbid myself too much.…

  Well, then, at ten o’clock yesterday morning we sailed, to our left the towering whitish and reddish heaven-storming towers of New York City, to our right the smoking chimneys, docks, etc., of Hoboken. The morning was misty; New York soon disappeared, and before long the big swells of the ocean began. At the fireship we dropped the American pilot and then sailed on out “into the mournful wasteland of the sea.” It is, as always, of cosmic grandeur and simplicity, compelling silence; for what has man to say here, especially at night when the ocean is alone with the starry sky? One looks out silently, surrendering all self-importance, and many old sayings and images scurry through the mind; a low voice says something about the age-oldness and infinitude of the “far-swelling, murmurous sea,” of “the waves of the sea and of love,” of Leukothea, the lovely goddess who appears in the foam of the seething waves to travel-weary Odysseus and gives him the pearly veil which saves him from Poseidon’s storm. The sea is like music; it has all the dreams of the soul within itself and sounds them over. The beauty and grandeur of the sea consists in our being forced down into the fruitful bottomlands of our own psyches, where we confront and re-create ourselves in the animation of the “mournful wasteland of the sea.” Now we are still worn out from the “torment of these last days.” We brood over the past few months, and the unconscious has a lot of work to do, putting in order all the things America has churned up within us.…

  Steamer Kaiser Wilhelm der Groose

  North German Lloyd

  BREMEN

  September 25, 1909

  .… Yesterday there was a storm that lasted all day until nearly midnight. Most of the day I stood up front, under the bridge, on a protected and elevated spot, and admired the magnificent spectacle as the mountainous waves rolled up and poured a whirling cloud of foam over the ship. The ship began to roll fearfully, and several times we were soaked by a salty shower. It turned cold, and we went in for a cup of tea. Inside, however, the brain flowed down the spinal canal and tried to come out again from under the stomach. Consequently I retired to my bed, where I soon felt fine again and later was able to consume a pleasant supper. Outside from time to time a wave thundered against the ship. The objects in my cabin had all come to life: the sofa cushion crawled about on the floor in the semi-darkness; a recumbent shoe sat up, looked around in astonishment, and then shuffled quietly off under the sofa; a standing shoe turned wearily on its side and followed its mate. Now the scene changed. I realized that the shoes had gone under the sofa to fetch my bag and brief case. The whole company paraded over to join the big trunk under the bed. One sleeve of my shirt on the sofa waved longingly after them, and from inside the chests and drawers came rumbles and rattles. Suddenly there was a terrible crash under my floor, a rattling, clattering, and tinkling. One of the kitchens is underneath me. There, at one blow, five hundred plates had been awakened from their deathlike torpor and with a single bold leap had put a sudden end to their dreary existence as slaves. In all the cabins round about, unspeakable groans betrayed the secrets of the menu. I slept like a top, and this morning the wind is beginning to blow from another side.…

  Appendix III

  LETTER TO EMMA JUNG FROM NORTH AFRICA (1920)

  Grand Hotel

  Sousse

  Sousse Monday, March 15, 1920

  This Africa is incredible

  … Unfortunately I cannot write coherently to you, for it is all too much. Only sidelights. After cold, heavy weather at sea, a sparkling morning in Algiers. Bright houses and streets, dark green clumps of trees, tall palms’ crowns rising among them. White burnooses, red fezzes, and among these the yellow uniforms of the Tirailleurs d’Afrique, the red of the Spahis, then the Botanical Gardens, an enchanted tropical forest, an Indian vision, holy acvatta trees with gigantic aerial roots like monsters, fantastic dwellings of the gods, enormous in extent, heavy, dark green foliage rustling in the sea wind.

  Then thirty hours by rail to Tunis. The Arab city is classical antiquity and Moorish middle ages, Granada and the fairy tale of Baghdad. You no longer think of yourself; you are dissolved in this potpourri which cannot be evaluated, still less described: a Roman column stands here as part of a wall; an old Jewess of unspeakable ugliness goes by in white baggy breeches; a crier with a load of burnooses pushes through the crowd, shouting in gutturals that might have come straight from the canton of Zürich; a patch of deep blue sky, a snow-white mosque dome; a shoemaker busily stitching away at shoes in a small vaulted niche, with a hot, dazzling patch of sunlight on the mat before him; blind musicians with a drum and tiny three-stringed lute; a beggar who consists of nothing but rags; smoke from oil cakes, and swarms of flies; up above, on a white minaret in the blissful ether, a muezzin sings the midday chant; below, a cool, shady,
colonnaded yard with horseshoe portal framed in glazed tiles; on the wall a mangy cat lies in the sun; a coming and going of red, white, yellow, blue, brown mantles, white turbans, red fezzes, uniforms, faces ranging from white and light yellow to deep black; a shuffling of yellow and red slippers, a noiseless scurrying of naked black feet, and so on and so on.

  In the morning the great god rises and fills both horizons with his joy and power, and all living things obey him. At night the moon is so silvery and glows with such divine clarity that no one can doubt the existence of Astarte.

  Between Algiers and Tunis lie 550 miles of African soil, towering up to the noble and spreading shapes of the great Atlas range, wide valleys and plateaus bursting with grapes and grain, dark green forests of cork oak. Today Horus rose out of distant, pale mountains over an unending green and brown plain, and from the desert there sprang up a mighty wind which blew out to the dark blue sea. On rolling, gray-green hills yellow-brown remains of whole Roman cities, small flocks of black goats grazing around them, nearby a Bedouin camp with black tents, camels, and donkeys. The train runs into a camel which cannot make up its mind to get off the tracks; the beast is killed; there is a great running up, shrieking, and gesticulating of white-clad figures; and always the sea, now deep blue, now hurting the eyes with its glitter in the sunlight. Out of olive groves and palms and hedges of giant cactus floating in the flickering, sun-shot air rises a snow-white city with divinely white domes and towers, gloriously spread out over a hill. Then comes Sousse, with white walls and towers, the harbor below; beyond the harbor wall the deep blue sea, and in the port lies the sailing ship with two lateen sails which I once painted!!!!

  You stumble over Roman remains; with my cane I dug a piece of Roman pottery out of the ground.

  This is all nothing but miserable stammering; I do not know what Africa is really saying to me, but it speaks. Imagine a tremendous sun, air clear as in the highest mountains, a sea bluer than any you have ever seen, all colors of incredible power. In the markets you can still buy the amphorae of antiquity—things like that—and the moon!!!! …

  Appendix IV

  RICHARD WILHELM

  I first met Richard Wilhelm at Count Keyserling’s during a meeting of the “School of Wisdom” in Darmstadt. That was in the early twenties. In 1923 we invited him to Zürich and he spoke on the I Ching1 at the Psychology Club.

  Even before meeting him I had been interested in Oriental philosophy, and around 1920 had begun experimenting with the I Ching. One summer in Bollingen I resolved to make an all-out attack on the riddle of this book. Instead of traditional stalks of yarrow required by the classical method, I cut myself a bunch of reeds. I would sit for hours on the ground beneath the hundred-year-old pear tree, the I Ching beside me, practicing the technique by referring the resultant oracles to one another in an interplay of questions and answers. All sorts of undeniably remarkable results emerged—meaningful connections with my own thought processes which I could not explain to myself.

  The only subjective intervention in this experiment consists in the experimenter’s arbitrarily—that is, without counting—dividing up the bundle of forty-nine stalks at a single swoop. He does not know how many stalks are contained in each bundle, and yet the result depends upon their numerical relationship. All other manipulations proceed mechanically and leave no room for interference by the will. If a psychic causal connection is present at all, it can only consist in the chance division of the bundle (or, in the other method, the chance fall of the coins).

  During the whole of those summer holidays I was preoccupied with the question: Are the I Ching’s answers meaningful or not? If they are, how does the connection between the psychic and the physical sequence of events come about? Time and again I encountered amazing coincidences which seemed to suggest the idea of an acausal parallelism (a synchronicity, as I later called it). So fascinated was I by these experiments that I altogether forgot to take notes, which I afterward greatly regretted. Later, however, when I often used to carry out the experiment with my patients, it became quite clear that a significant number of answers did indeed hit the mark. I remember, for example, the case of a young man with a strong mother complex. He wanted to marry, and had made the acquaintance of a seemingly suitable girl. However, he felt uncertain, fearing that under the influence of his complex he might once more find himself in the power of an overwhelming mother. I conducted the experiment with him. The text of his hexagram read: “The maiden is powerful. One should not marry such a maiden.”

  In the mid-thirties I met the Chinese philosopher Hu Shih. I asked him his opinion of the I Ching, and received the reply: “Oh, that’s nothing but an old collection of magic spells, without significance.” He had had no experience with it—or so he said. Only once, he remembered, had he come across it in practice. One day on a walk with a friend, the friend had told him about his unhappy love affair. They were just passing by a Taoist temple. As a joke, he had said to his friend: “Here you can consult the oracle!” No sooner said than done. They went into the temple together and asked the priest for an I Ching oracle. But he had not the slightest faith in this nonsense.

  I asked him whether the oracle had been correct. Whereupon he replied reluctantly, “Oh yes, it was, of course …” Remembering the well-known story of the “good friend” who does everything one does not wish to do oneself, I cautiously asked him whether he had not profited by this opportunity. “Yes,” he replied, “as a joke I asked a question too.”

  “And did the oracle give you a sensible answer?” I asked.

  He hesitated. “Oh well, yes, if you wish to put it that way.” The subject obviously made him uncomfortable.

  A few years after my first experiments with the reeds, the I Ching was published with Wilhelm’s commentary. I instantly obtained the book, and found to my gratification that Wilhelm took much the same view of the meaningful connections as I had. But he knew the entire literature and could therefore fill in the gaps which had been outside my competence. When Wilhelm came to Zürich, I had the opportunity to discuss the matter with him at length, and we talked a great deal about Chinese philosophy and religion. What he told me, out of his wealth of knowledge of the Chinese mentality, clarified some of the most difficult problems that the European unconscious had posed for me. On the other hand, what I had to tell him about the results of my investigations of the unconscious caused him no little surprise; for he recognized in them things he had considered to be the exclusive possession of the Chinese philosophical tradition.

  As a young man Wilhelm had gone to China in the service of a Christian mission, and there the mental world of the Orient had opened its doors wide to him. Wilhelm was a truly religious spirit, with an unclouded and farsighted view of things. He had the gift of being able to listen without bias to the revelations of a foreign mentality, and to accomplish that miracle of empathy which enabled him to make the intellectual treasures of China accessible to Europe. He was deeply influenced by Chinese culture, and once said to me, “It is a great satisfaction to me that I never baptized a single Chinese!” In spite of his Christian background, he could not help recognizing the logic and clarity of Chinese thought. “Influenced” is not quite the word to describe its effect upon him; it had overwhelmed and assimilated him. His Christian views receded into the background, but did not vanish entirely; they formed a kind of mental reservation, a moral proviso that was later to have fateful consequences.

  In China he had the good fortune to meet a sage of the old school whom the revolution had driven out of the interior. This sage, Lau Nai Süan, introduced him to Chinese yoga philosophy and the psychology of the I Ching. To the collaboration of these two men we owe the edition of the I Ching with its excellent commentary. For the first time this profoundest work of the Orient was introduced to the West in a living and comprehensible fashion. I consider this publication Wilhelm’s most important work. Clear and unmistakably Western as his mentality was, in his I Ching commentary he manifested a degr
ee of adaptation to Chinese psychology which is altogether unmatched.

  When the last page of the translation was finished and the first printer’s proofs were coming in, the old master Lau Nai Süan died. It was as if his work were completed and he had delivered the last message of the old, dying China to Europe. And Wilhelm had been the perfect disciple, a fulfillment of the wish-dream of the sage.

  Wilhelm, when I met him, seemed completely Chinese, in outward manner as much as in his way of writing and speaking. The Oriental point of view and ancient Chinese culture had penetrated him through and through. Upon his arrival in Europe, he entered the faculty of the China Institute in Frankfurt am Main. Both in his teaching work and in his lectures to laymen, however, he seemed to feel the pressure of the European spirit. Christian views and forms of thought moved steadily into the foreground. I went to hear some lectures of his and they turned out to be scarcely any different from conventional sermons.

  This reversion to the past seemed to me somewhat unreflective and therefore dangerous. I saw it as a reassimilation to the West, and felt that as a result of it Wilhelm must come into conflict with himself. Since it was, so I thought, a passive assimilation, that is to say, a succumbing to the influence of the environment, there was the danger of a relatively unconscious conflict, a clash between his Western and Eastern psyche. If, as I assumed, the Christian attitude had originally given way to the influence of China, the reverse might well be taking place now: the European element might be gaining the upper hand over the Orient once again. If such a process takes place without a strong, conscious attempt to come to terms with it, the unconscious conflict can seriously affect the physical state of health.